Sharif Digital Repository

In this paper, the influence of the excitation angle on the Endurance Time (TCT) analysis of skewed slab-on-girdcr bridges is studied. The excitation of the structure due to the critical angle produces maximum seismic responses that are sometimes significantly higher than the average. The modeled bridges are of slab-on-girder type that are typically used as highway bridges. The bridge models have skew angles of 0, 15, 30, 45, and CO degrees. The ET excitations exerted on structures cover a broad range of hazard levels. The results provide some insight with regard to choosing multiple excitation angles so as to balance computational costs and retain acceptable accuracy for practical design... 

The aim of this paper is to introduce a novel approach, called Endurance Wave Analysis (EWA), for non-linear dynamic analysis and assessment of offshore structures subjected to irregular wave forces. This is, in fact, an extension of the Endurance Time Analysis (ETA) already presented by previous researchers for the seismic assessment of onshore structures. With the EWA method, the offshore structure is simulated under a predefined Intensifying Wave Train Function (IWTF), corresponding to a gradually deteriorating sea state at a specific site. The function is designed so that the roughness of the sea state represented by them increases over the time and even goes well beyond the design sea... 

Endurance Time (ET) method is a time history based method for seismic evaluation of structures using intensifying dynamic excitation as the loading function. In this paper, application of this method in the analysis of steel tanks has been investigated. A methodology for practical application of ET method in seismic assessment of storage tanks has been presented. This methodology has been applied in three-dimensional nonlinear analysis of a particular anchored steel tank using Finite Element method, and results are compared with conventional codified design procedures. Results of the analyses indicate reasonable accuracy of the proposed method in estimation of seismic responses of steel... 

The existing loss assessment frameworks in the literature are mainly limited to the evaluation of the expected lifetime seismic losses, and do not assess the probability distribution of the long-term losses. The long-term loss is defined as the cumulative seismic loss of the structures over the service life. However, the probability distribution of the long-term losses can also be informative for decision-making under uncertain seismic consequences. This paper proposes an efficient procedure to calculate the probability distribution of the long-term losses. The procedure is based on the discretization of continuous random variables and performing two sets of recursive convolutions. The... 

In this paper, application of a new dynamic procedure called Endurance Time (ET) method in seismic analysis of steel frames is explained. In this method, structures are subjected to gradually intensifying ground shaking and their performance is assessed based on their response considering relevant design criteria at each intensity level. By considerably reducing the number of time history analyses for assessment of structural response at different intensities, this procedure tends to pave a way for practical performance based design of structures. The accuracy of ET method in predicting the response of structures in linear and nonlinear analysis is investigated by considering a set of steel... 

A Consistent One-Bay Frame (COBF) simplified model for the efficient estimation of Engineering Demand Parameters (EDPs) in Steel Moment Resisting Frames (SMRFs) with equal and unequal bay lengths is proposed. The geometry of the Substitute One-Bay Frame (SOBF) simplified model has been used, and the elastic and inelastic properties of the beams and columns in this model are determined using an energy consistent approach in a way that the energy balance is established between the members of the original SMRF and the SOBF simplified model. This way, the SOBF simplified model, which originally could only be used for MRFs with equal bay lengths, can now be used for MRFs with any geometric... 

Sub-surface cracks in pipelines with internal pressure may severely affect their dynamic response. The extreme cases of these cracks are when these cracks go through the thickness of the pipes. Dynamic responses of cracked and un-cracked pipes with fixed ends and under various internal pressures were evaluated experimentally and theoretically. In the experimental part, the effects of pipe internal pressure on the resonant frequencies and damping of the pipe were evaluated. In the theoretical part, finite element analyses were performed to find dynamic response of pipes with various crack length and orientation respect to the axis of the pipe. The experimental results showed resonant... 

We study the metal-insulator transition of the one-dimensional diagonal Anderson ternary model with long range correlated disorder. The starting point of the model corresponds to a ternary alloy (i.e. with three possible on-site energies), and shows a metal-insulator transition when the random distribution of site energies is assumed to have a power spectrum S(k) ∝ 1/k (2α-1). In this paper, we define a purity parameter for the ternary alloy which adjusts the occupancy probability of site potentials, and for any given α we calculate the critical purity parameter for which extended states are obtained. In this way, we show that the ternary alloy requires weaker correlations than the binary... 

Performance-based optimal seismic design of structures requires repetitive and massive dynamic analyses. In the Endurance Time (ET) method, structures are subjected to specially designed intensifying acceleration functions and their response at various excitation levels is estimated by each single response-history analysis, thus, significantly reducing the required computational demand. In this paper, the ET method is utilized to acquire optimal placement of viscous dampers in short steel frames with the target of obtaining the desirable performance in two hazard levels simultaneously. In the optimization procedure, the damping coefficients of the added dampers are treated as design... 

Various durations of Endurance Time Acceleration Functions (ETAFs) associated with different seismic hazard levels are presented to enable Endurance Time (ET) method for use in probabilistic seismic demand assessment studies. Various Intensity Measures (IMs) were, first, considered for establishing multiple "IM-duration" relationships. A set of 30 RC moment resisting frames were, then, subjected to IDA analysis using 44 ground motion records and the median IM values corresponding to different structural response levels were extracted. These values were compared with the ET-derived IMs by computing the errors corresponding to various demand levels and summating these errors over a complete... 

This study aims to evaluate the influences of modeling-related uncertainties on the seismic response and fragility function of the four vulnerable components of electrical substation equipment, taking into account the dynamic interaction between apparatuses via bus slider-rigid bus conductors. The 3D finite element model for interconnected disconnect switch- circuit breaker-current transformer-surge arrester system is developed in OpenSees software. A sensitivity analysis is conducted to evaluate and rank the importance of individual random variables on the seismic responses. To incorporate modeling uncertainties into the failure fragility function, probabilistic structural interconnected... 

At the present study, application of endurance time analysis (ETA) method in seismic evaluation of arch dams is investigated. ETA is a time-history based dynamic pushover procedure, which utilizes a set of predesigned intensifying acceleration functions to estimate the responses of the structural systems in various seismic excitation levels. Dez dam was chosen as the case study and all contraction and peripheral joints were modeled based on as-built drawings. The reservoir was modeled as a compressible medium and the foundation was assumed to be massless. Results show that ETA method is able to estimate dynamic responses of the dam with acceptable accuracy in comparison with time history... 

Cylindrical shells constitute the main structural components in pressure vessels and pipelines. Cylindrical shells made of fiber-reinforced composites are now being considered in the design of many components due to their high specific strength and stiffness. Buckling is one of the main failure considerations, when designing the cylindrical shells. The buckling behavior of the composite cylindrical shells can severely be compromised by introducing defect in the structure, due to high stress field generated around these defects. Defects could be generated during service due to cyclic loading or during manufacturing. A reliable operation of these structures require to understand the effects of... 

This study aims to show the efficiency of a proposed spectral matching technique for the reduction of required ground motions in the dynamic time history analysis. In this non-stationary spectral matching approach, unconstrained optimization is employed to adjust the signal to match a target spectrum. Adjustment factors of discrete wavelet transform (DWT) coefficients associated with the signals are then considered as decision variables and the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm is employed to find the optimum values of DWT coefficients. This matching algorithm turns out to be quite effective in the spectral matching objective, where matching at multiple damping ratios can be readily achieved.... 

Dominant Collapse Mechanisms (DCMs) have been reported to play an important role in collapse capacity of structural systems and the seismic losses consequent to it. Therefore, DCMs of Reinforced Concrete (RC) frames have been studied, in this article, considering Record-To-Record (RTR) and modeling uncertainties. Two sets of RC frames have been designed, in this regard, that share the design assumptions but contain different levels of over-strength. Each set contains 26, 4- to 20-story nonlinearly modeled frames. Initially, Incremental Dynamic Analysis (IDA) was used to identify frames' DCMs. Then, the RTR variability reflected through IDA was combined with spectral shape and pulse effects... 

Probabilistic Seismic Loss Estimation is a methodology used as a quantitative and explicit expression of the performance of buildings using terms that address the interests of both owners and insurance companies. Applying the ATC 58 approach for seismic loss assessment of buildings requires using Incremental Dynamic Analysis (IDA), which needs hundreds of time-consuming analyses, which in turn hinders its wide application. The Endurance Time Method (ETM) is proposed herein as part of a demand propagation prediction procedure and is shown to be an economical alternative to IDA. Various scenarios were considered to achieve this purpose and their appropriateness has been evaluated using... 

In Endurance Time (ET) method, structures are subjected to gradually intensifying accelerograms and their performance is judged based on the maximum time duration in which they can satisfy the predefined endurance criteria. Damage indexes are used in ET method as the endurance criteria. In this paper, correlation between the values of various damage indexes as obtained from nonlinear time-history analysis of steel moment frames subjected to scaled earthquakes are compared with those from ET method at the same level of spectral acceleration. It is shown that the average value of various damage indexes can be estimated from ET analysis results. Advantages, accuracy and limitations of this... 

The Endurance Time (ET) method is a time-history based dynamic pushover procedure for seismic analysis and design of structures. In this procedure, structures are subjected to a specially designed intensifying accelerogram and their Endurance Time is measured based on the time interval during which they can resist the imposed dynamic actions. In this paper, application of the ET method in linear seismic analysis of structures has been investigated. The procedure for generating code compliant uniformly intensifying ET accelerograms has been explained. A set of three such accelerograms have been applied to various moment and braced steel frames and the results of analysis are compared to... 

The presented paper deals with the parametric instability behavior of a simply supported rectangular plate with a crack emanating from one edge, subjected to in-plane compressive periodic edge loading. The problem is reduced to computing the free vibration frequencies and the corresponding mode shapes and substituting them into an integral equation based formula, which leads to a compact matrix form. Once the components of this matrix are found, the rest of the computation, i.e., establishing regions of instability, buckling loads and modified frequencies, is straightforward and fast. Several plates, each with a different dimension and crack length size are analyzed using this approach. The... 

The vibration, buckling and parametric instability behavior of a simply supported rectangular plate with a crack emanating from one edge, subjected to in-plane compressive periodic edge loading is studied in this paper. Several plates, each with a different dimension and crack length size are analyzed using an analytical approach. The results of this study show that the vibration, buckling and parametric instability behavior of plates with length to width ratio greater than unity are considerably affected by the crack length size